DoC Professor receives 2014 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award

Professor Alexander Wolf from the Department of Computing has been announced the winner of 2014 ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award.

ACM’s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering (SIGSOFT) has named Professor Alexander L. Wolf (www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~alw/) as the recipient of its 2014 Outstanding Research Award “For formative work in software architecture, influential research in distributed event-based systems, and important contributions in software deployment, configuration management, and process."

The award will be presented at the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2014) in Hyderabad, India (2014.icse-conferences.org/). This award is presented to Professor Wolf for his significant and lasting research contributions to the theory and practice of software engineering. The award is accompanied by an honorarium and an invitation to give a keynote presentation at the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering to be held in Hong Kong, China, this coming November.

Professor Wolf and Professor Dewayne Perry (from the University of Texas), began the modern study of software architecture with the publication of their seminal paper, “Foundations for the Study of Software Architecture.” According to the ACM Digital Library, it is the most highly cited article in software engineering.

With respect to event-notification systems, Professor Wolf along with his co-authors Dr. Antonio Carzaniga and Professor David Rosenblum, published the paper “Design and Evaluation of a Wide-Area Event Notification Service.” This paper set the stage for a long sequence of important contributions, by Professor Wolf and others, to the design of large-scale distributed systems. The attendant open-source Siena system has been widely influential in both industry and academia.

Additional research contributions by Professor Wolf in collaboration with colleagues and students include path-breaking work in software process discovery and validation (which was the seminal work in the area of process mining, now a billion-dollar industry), software deployment (which led to the initiation of a conference series on Component Deployment), and configuration management (which contributed formative notions subsequently adopted by commercial CM systems).

Few researchers can come close to matching Professor Wolf’s research breadth and grasp. While software engineering is his intellectual “home” it is important to note that he and his work extend further, making important contributions in distributed systems and networking through work published in top venues of ACM and IEEE. This breadth and quality is impressive, and has attracted many millions of pounds in research funding.

The following individuals are the previous winners: